Sgt Goddard and corruption in 1920s' London
The Goddard case offers a fascinating glimpse of the Roaring Twenties as London's West End partied on during a Tory crackdown on nightclubs
On 20 September 1928, London’s Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir William Horwood received an anonymous letter.
This alleged that Sergeant George Goddard of Vine Street station, a man with 28 years’ service, had been taking backhanders from the owners of illicit clubs in London’s West End.
The mystery correspondent pointed to Goddard’s rather splendid house in the South London suburb of Streatham and his swanky American Chrysler car as proof of his ill-gotten income.
They also claimed Goddard had set his brother-in-law up in a pawnbroker’s business.
Inquiries were made. It was quickly discovered that the humble sergeant, weekly wage £6/15s (£6.75), owned a house that cost £1,850, his car cost £400, he had various safe deposits – one containing £12,000 – and bank accounts.
Goddard said, ‘I am done for’
It was calculated that the humble sergeant had assets amounting to around £18,000, equivalent to around £1.4million today.
When told Scotland Yard wanted the keys to his deposit boxes, Goddard apparently reeled – ‘I am done for.’
Goddard was certainly in the perfect job to be tempted by bribes. He was part of C Division – consisting of Vine Street, Tottenham Court Road and Great Marlborough Street police stations.
This covered the vice areas of Soho, with its ‘disorderly houses’ (brothels) and nightclubs, which often flouted the legal ban on the sale of alcohol after 11pm.
Goddard’s specific job was to follow up reports of illegality at these establishments and raid them if necessary.
If proprietors were suspected of breaking the law, they could be prosecuted.
Evidence would emerge that Goddard, in following up information of law-breaking, would file reports suggesting the claims of illegality were baseless. Alternatively, he might tip off the owners that a raid was coming, so that illegal booze and evidence of its sale could be hidden.
Bank notes were also traced to an Italian restaurant, whose proprietor treated the officer to a free lunch five or six times a week.
He was charged with corruptly accepting and obtaining money from club proprietor Kate Meyrick, known as the ‘queen of the nightclubs’, and restaurateur and club owner Luigi Ribuffini, both of whom went on trial alongside the sergeant.
All three were also charged with conspiracy and perverting the course of justice.
On 29 January 1929, at the Old Bailey, Goddard was sentenced to 18 months’ hard labour, with a £2,000 fine plus prosecution costs. His two co-conspirators got 15 months each.
During a previous disciplinary hearing Goddard had admitted neglect of duty in failure to explain where he had got the large amounts of money from, in addition to betting and associating with bookmakers (turning a blind eye to illegal betting was another lucrative grift open to Goddard).
How did Goddard get away with it for so long?
I first came across the Goddard case when researching my 2023 book The Real Ted Hastings, which charted the real corruption cases that feature in the BBC drama Line of Duty. I cited the case as an example of bent policedom that suggested corruption in Metropolitan Police was not a modern phenomenon.
Pick a decade and you’ll find plenty of wrongdoing, despite Scotland Yard’s international reputation for probity and the British bobby’s clean-cut image.
The fact that Goddard got away with effectively licensing illegal nightclubs, betting and possibly prostitution in London’s West End, becoming ostentatiously rich as he went, begs the question of how he got away with it for so long.
During 1926 to 1928 several anonymous letters were sent to the police about restaurants and hotels that contained brothels, and nightclubs where alcohol and cocaine was freely available.
Goddard conducted his usual ‘light’ investigations on these premises and reported no truth in the reports.
In March 1928, some five months before Goddard was finally exposed, Home Secretary Sir William Joynson-Hicks received word of a club in C Division that was a place of ‘the most intense mischief and immorality’, with ‘doped women and drunken men’.
Superintendent Charles Morton, Goddard’s boss, offered to raid the establishment, Mrs Meyrick’s 43 Club, without informing Goddard. In an operation that took place at 1.30am, police brought in from outside C Division found around 300 people boozing away.
Questioned to the point of exhaustion
At the later corruption trial, Morton was asked if Goddard was subsequently questioned about how this could happen on his watch.
Morton replied to several questions along these lines that no, Goddard had not been confronted with how and why he had failed to deal with the 43 Club.
Why was Goddard never punished for such an obvious failure at that time? And a repeated failure most likely, given the number of other anonymous informants asserting law-breaking in clubland.
The implication must be that Goddard was siphoning some of his bribe money to some of his superiors.
An incident from six years earlier further suggests that Goddard was well looked after by those senior to him. In 1922 an incorruptible sergeant called Horace Josling claimed Goddard was in charge of handing out bribes from local bookmakers at Great Marlborough Street nick.
Josling’s reward for whistleblowing was to be interrogated for two days to ‘the point of mental and physical exhaustion’, as he later recalled.
He was found guilty of making false claims against a fellow officer. He was forced to resign and lost his pension.
In subsequent police histories, Goddard is portrayed as the rotten apple, the time-honoured scapegoat usually cited in police corruption cases.
It was the distinguished academic Clive Emsley who questioned this interpretation. In his essay Sergeant Goddard: The Story of a Rotten Apple, or a Diseased Orchard? Emsley listed an inspector and 26 police constables dismissed from Great Marlborough Street for taking backhanders from bookies and tradesmen in 1931.
Another 23 PCs were transferred from C Division.
The Metropolitan Police refused to make any statement about these actions.
A bit like a suspect under police interrogation offering ‘no comment’ to every question. The implication is clearly that the culture in C Division was rotten and had allowed Goddard to thrive.
For my part, I may do a little more research about Goddard. I’m interested to know what happened to him after he left prison.
Just read an intriguing feature by award-winning New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Having previously been absorbed by his books Empire of Pain (about the Sackler dynasty and the opioid crisis in the US) and Rogues (essays), I am in awe of his painstaking research and picking apart of complex and important stories. His February Letter from London in The New Yorker, A Teen’s Fatal Plunge into the London Underworld, delves into the shady area of illegal money and influence from abroad and how it may sway investigations by London’s police. A masterclass in investigative journalism.
Absolutely, Josling was totally vindicated, though, as you point out, the Home Sec was stiff-necked about it and only reluctantly compensated him. Apparently, Josling retired as a much-loved and respected headmaster. The hidden story is how the hierarchy – and who among them – decided to wreck his career in favour of Goddard, who was as bent as a nine-bob note. That's a pattern that's is replayed to this day (I know an officer who fell foul of certain senior people). And you're right – a Josling prize would be a fitting tribute to a wronged man – but it would also be a bit of a contradiction in a force meant to be imbued with honesty.
George Goddard was my grandfather’s cousin. He became a second-hand car salesman after release from prison. For other information, feel free to email me: noggin134@gmail.com